Phillip Roth Reveals "I'm Done" With Writing

In today's New York Times Artsbeat Blog, legendary author Philip Roth revealed that he will no longer be in the business of penning novels. The 79-year-old made the comment in a recent interview with the French magazine Les inRocks. Referring to his latest work, he told the magazine, “To tell you the truth, I’m done. “‘Nemesis’ will be my last book.”

He added, “I do not want to read, to write more. I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

Roth gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American-Jewish life that earned him the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint.

Roth has been one of the most honored authors of his generation: his books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. His 2000 novel The Human Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year.